I've been a loyal ZoneAlarm user for quite a long time. Today, however, I came across another great firewall, the Tiny Personal Firewall (www.tinysoftware.com).
I downloaded the application, installed it and rebooted. When my computer was back up again, I started browsing the web and doing other stuff as usual. I had ZoneAlarm also running in the background. After a while, a dialog from the Tiny firewall popped up, asking me if I wanted to give ZoneAlarm permission to connect to the internet. The address was 222.zonelabs.com, port 80.

I'm sure that I had disabled the Check for updates option in ZoneAlarm, so why the hell is it trying to connect to the ZoneLabs server? I just can't think of a good reason.

Any ideas why ZoneAlarm is acting like that?
Could it be spyware?

I'm a bit paranoid about stuff like this, so I uninstalled ZoneAlarm immediately, and I won't be reinstalling it any time soon.

run a packet sniffer while zonealarm is running to see what is it that it's sending to that server which seems to be a web server since it's using port 80. It could be logging something, check it out.
goatass

zz,
What u mean is ZoneAlarm or ZoneAlarm Pro ?? or both??

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NotMe (05-16-2001 08:40):
zz,
What u mean is ZoneAlarm or ZoneAlarm Pro ?? or both??
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I was using the free version of ZoneAlarm.

After reading your message, I emailed ZoneAlarm. With their permission what follows is their response.
vgb

=================
Thank you for taking the time to write us about these rumors. ZoneAlarm and
ZoneAlarm Pro absolutely do not collect any surfing data about users'
behavior. The only information Zone Labs ever sees from an end-user is: (1)
your registration data (if you chose to supply it), (2) your version and
registration numbers (if you have one) every time you "check for updates"
(if you have that option marked in the configure panel), and (3) Alert data,
when you click the More Info button on an Alert. This information does not
get shared with anyone else, as we guarantee in our privacy statement on our
Web site.

Zone Labs never receives any other information from ZoneAlarm or ZoneAlarm
Pro clients and cannot retrieve any other info from your machine. Since our
products do not log users' surfing behavior, there is no way for this
information to be retrieved.

ZoneAlarm does leave elements in the registry after an uninstall, but our
FAQ details how to remove them in the event of a problem. That information
is found at http://www.zonelabs.com/support.htm

You specifically mentioned 222.zonelabs.com and Port 80. 222.zonelabs.com
handles registration info, alert analyzer, and version updates. Port 80 is
specified because the information going to 222.zonelabs.com is HTTP traffic,
which is transmitted through Port 80.

Zone Labs is a company formed by software engineers, exclusively for the
purpose of creating great software. Please let me know if you have any
additional questions.

Best regards,
Mischa

-----------------------
Mischa Garner
Zone Labs, Inc.
Direct: 415-341-8225
Fax: 415-341-8299
mgarner@zonelabs.com
=================================

yes, its spyware.. ZoneAlarm is crap

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loc (05-17-2001 20:13):
yes, its spyware.. ZoneAlarm is crap.
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Is this your gut feel, your opinion or do you have real facts that this is the case?

Hi

Using ZA own features,
did you try and block this access in the 'restricted zones' options
like 222.zonelabs.com resolves to 215.15.66.222

Does it still try and connect after this blocking ? If so then it would be spyware !

SplAj